Abstract

The article focuses on three crime fiction novels published in Italy that take as their central characters operators or officers working in the mobile units of the Italian police. These novels are considered as cultural objects with specific characteristics. They show an anthropological pessimism and develop a kind of theory of social hatred. Because of their critical attitude to social reality, they seem to belong to the noir genre. However, these novels make a moral distinction between the police on the one hand and the football fans and political activists they encounter at sporting events or demonstrations on the other. The three books analysed here therefore seem to have a more conservative than critical attitude towards the social order, especially as they play a key social and political role: that of legitimising the police and their work, even when it is violently repressive.